ZAIN

Overview

Zain| Leading telecommunications and digital services provider in Saudi Arabia
Country: Saudi Arabia
Industry: Telecommunication
Solution: i2Availability

Information2’s core data replication and protection products, i2Availability, have successfully created a fast, efficient, and streamlined disaster recovery application management system spanning 410 kilometers for Zain, a renowned telecom operator in Saudi Arabia.

Customer Challenges

Zain, a leading telecom operator among the three major players in Saudi Arabia, has a rich history and extensive business presence in the Middle East and Africa. Its business covers multiple countries, providing diverse services such as wireless communications, telephony, data, and video communications to tens of millions of telecom mobile users.

To ensure the continuity of telecom services, Zain has established a production center in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, and a disaster recovery center in Dammam, a city in the eastern region. With a distance of 410 kilometers between the two locations, Zain urgently needs to implement disaster recovery via dedicated lines between them to ensure that critical systems such as FM, ITNMS, and PM can quickly execute application-level disaster recovery switching in extreme situations such as war, terrorist attacks, vandalism, misoperations, and downtime.

Additionally, Zain requires real-time data synchronization at the application software layer and Oracle database layer to ensure data integrity and consistency.

Solution

Addressing Zain’s actual needs, Information2 carefully designed the following solution:

Install a control machine on the Linux/Windows hosts in the Dammam disaster recovery center and Information2 offers real-time data backup solution. This ensures that the latest data is always available for immediate recovery without a backup time window, significantly improving data availability and security.

Simultaneously, Information2 monitors the application’s high availability management monitoring platform through the control machine and employs i2Availability for high availability system disaster recovery. This solution enables rapid manual group switching in case of any issues with the source production host, achieving seamless business takeover and effectively avoiding business interruptions due to source-side problems.

Solution Effects

Firstly, it achieves data synchronization across heterogeneous platforms: Information2’s solution successfully breaks down barriers between physical servers of different models and configurations and virtualization platforms from different vendors, enabling data synchronization between host layers and providing a solid foundation for Zain’s disaster recovery system.

Secondly, it offers simplified management and graphical switching: The I2 Solution console is based on a B/S architecture with a user-friendly interface and easy operation. It provides multiple functions such as manual, automatic, and group switching, making Zain’s disaster recovery management more flexible and efficient. This solution not only reduces management costs but also improves the accuracy and speed of disaster recovery switching, providing robust support for the continuity of Zain’s telecom services.